CHEER Symposium for the 2013 SRHE Conference
Performing Difference in the Global Academy
Proponent: Professor Louise Morley
Rationale
Globally, higher education is caught between the hypermodernism of the knowledge
economy and the archaism of elitism. Global convergence means that it is now
characterised by the development of international, entrepreneurial and corporate
universities and speeded up nomadic public intellectuals. There are new student
constituencies, literacies and modalities of communication. Borders are dissolving
and academic (hyper)mobility is promoted. However, the frenzy of liquified
globalisation is often underpinned by an indifference to social difference. The
urgency of austerity is reinvigorating poor quality employment and learning
environments, unequal employment regimes, elitist participation practices and
globalised gender inequalities and exclusions.
Global economic recession and ensuing austerity cultures mean that higher education
currently abounds with a sense of crisis and policy turbulence. It is rapidly being
repositioned as a private good and, as such, is increasingly being funded by
individuals and households, rather than by nation states. While higher education is
viewed as enhancing a nation’s competitive advantage, different countries are (dis)
investing differently in its future. Transformation has largely been driven by the
perceived needs of the economy rather than by academic imaginaries or social
movements. A potent political and moral economy has been shaped by the
performance driven international prestige economy. Positional values and
differentiation now drive the sector. In all the urgency of reform, there is a tendency
for higher education to focus on the data that will be used to address the powerful
regulatory technologies and aspirational frameworks of the global league tables. As
equity and diversity are not included as indicators of quality in global league tables,
they are being eclipsed.
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Survival of the sector, rather than development, has become a dominant concern in
many national locations. The construct of defence has been evoked as a form of
resistance to privatisation and marketisation of the global academy. However, social
difference is either overlooked or contradictorily conceptualised both in terms of
disparagement and desire. This symposium attempts to interrogate the gaps and
silences that are the result of the re-orientation of higher education to market values
and will question how difference is performed, overlooked, eclipsed or undertheorised in the turbulent policy world of higher education. Diverse markers of
difference will be interrogated in relation to gender and leadership, the normative
assumptions in critical thinking discourses, performativities of the ideal student, the
affectively charged experiences of black and ethnic minority staff and the identity
projects of refugees in higher education.
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Paper One: Lost Leaders: Women in the Global Academy
Professor Louise Morley, Director, Centre for Higher Education and Equity
Research (CHEER), University of Sussex, UK.
Keywords: gender, leadership, international, absences, disqualifications
Abstract
Drawing on data gathered from British Council seminars Absent Talent: Women in
Research and Academic Leadership in Hong Kong (September, 2012), Tokyo
(January, 2013) and Dubai (March, 2013) this paper discusses diverse academic
women’s experiences and explanations for women’s under-representation as
knowledge leaders and producers in the global academy. Participants from East Asian
and Middle East and North African (MENA) regions shared experiences and
identified desires for future action in the form of a Manifesto for Change (Forestier,
2013). The paper combines empirical data on enablers, impediments and attractions
with consideration of debates on women’s exclusions and disqualifications from
academic leadership and knowledge production. Invoking Berlant’s (2012) construct
of cruel optimism, a key question is whether women are desiring, dismissing or being
disqualified from senior leadership positions in the global academy.
Paper
Career Progression: Cruel Optimism?
While the global academy is characterised by hypermodernism the archaism of maledominated leadership remains (Morley, 2011, 2012, 2013). Few countries have
achieved Sweden’s success of forty-three per cent female vice-chancellors (She
Figures, 2009). In most countries, gender escapes organisational logic in relation to
leadership, and the logic of reciprocity implied in meritocracy is disrupted when it
comes to identifying women as potential leaders. This could be evidence of
democratic deficit, distributive injustice, and structural prejudices. There are
questions about who self-identifies or is identified by existing power elites, as having
leadership legitimacy? One explanation is that women’s capital is devalued,
misrecognised and disqualified in current reward, recruitment and promotions
practices (Rees, 2011). The problem may also reside in wider cultural scripts for
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leaders that coalesce or collide with normative gender performances. If leadership is
associated with particular forms of masculinity, women leaders represent contextual
discontinuity, interruptive in their shock quality.
Women are also reflexively scanning leadership and dismissing it as a career option
(Morley, 2013a), not equating it with vertical career success, but more as restriction
of creativity inducing conventionality and conformity to norms and values that are
alien and alienating (Haake, 2009). Berlant (2011) described the relation in which one
depends on objects that block the very thriving that motivates our attachment in the
first place as ‘cruel optimism’. Women’s relationship with leadership can be a form of
cruel optimism in so far as desiring it seldom leads to its attainment. While some
women do enter and flourish, for others, aspirations to lead differently in today’s
managerialised global academy can also be a form of cruel optimism.
Speaking Out
In preparation for British Council seminars Absent Talent: Women in Research and
Academic Leadership in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Dubai, forty questionnaires were
circulated to academic women in Australia, China, Egypt, Hong Kong, Indonesia,
Japan, Jordan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Morocco, Pakistan, Palestine, the Philippines,
Singapore, Thailand, and Turkey and twenty were returned. The sample included
vice-chancellors, deputy vice-chancellors, deans, research directors, mid and early
career academic women. Questions included what makes leadership attractive/
unattractive to women, and what enables/ impedes women to enter leadership
positions. This group is referred to as respondents.
Panel discussions and paper presentations were also analysed. In Hong Kong,
panelists comprised six senior women from Australia, China, Hong Kong, the
Philippines and Thailand. In Tokyo, panelists comprised three senior academic
women from Japan, Thailand and the UK and papers were presented from the
Philippines, Malaysia and Japan. In Dubai, papers were presented from senior women
from Egypt, Hong Kong, Jordan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Morocco, Pakistan, Palestine,
and Turkey. This group is referred to as discussants. There were twenty-two seminar
participants in Hong Kong, twenty-five in Tokyo and twenty-five in Dubai. This
group is referred to as participants. A total of seventy-two respondents, discussants
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and participants in three seminars contributed to these data. From this small sample, a
range of insightful observations was collected.
What’s Going Wrong?
Gendered divisions of labour within and beyond the academy were frequently cited.
Leadership itself was hierarchicalised with women allowed entry into less prestigious,
inward-looking roles. A Chinese respondent suggested that women work in:
Low professional titles, low-level management and administrative positions,
most of them are responsible for student affairs.
A question was whether women’s under-representation was the result of
discrimination or whether women make affective and material calculations regarding
the costliness of attachment to leadership aspirations? Many women in this sample
discussed gaining influence. However, leadership was frequently constructed as loss loss of status and self-esteem in the case of unsuccessful applications, but loss of
independence, research time and well-being when applications were successful. A
Hong Kong respondent saw the neo-liberalised and male-dominated, managerialised
academy as an unattractive space:
The boys’ club issue, also massification and internationalisation of the sector
together with reduction in funding by government means roles have changed
and are more challenging in terms of time and skills - business management,
fund raising, marketing.
Some leadership values as well as the long hours’ culture were unattractive. Working
with resistance and recalcitrance, colonising colleagues’ subjectivities towards the
goals of the managerially inspired discourses in the competitive prestige economy
involve material and affective workloads that result in unliveable lives (Butler, 2004).
A cultural climate, or hidden curriculum, resulting in organisational and cultural
norms that depress women’s aspirations and career orientations was widely noted. A
structural observation related to the incompatibility of women’s caring responsibilities
with the temporalities and rhythms of academia (Cheung & Halpern, 2010). A
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Japanese respondent saw the gendered division of labour in wider society as a major
barrier:
A woman in Japan has to take care of her children, as well as both her parents,
and sometimes even her husband's parents, besides the domestic duties on daily
life. They do not have enough time to concentrate on doing research. And the
percentage female university teachers in Japan who do not marry is 47.5 per
cent.
A Turkish respondent highlighted availability of affordable domestic services in many
countries discussed, suggesting other explanations for women’s absences e.g. women
constructed as defective men, characterised by deficit and defined by lack. A
Moroccan respondent described how women’s potential is depressed because:
The state policy seems to favour a macho vision of society…This discourages
women and makes them have less ambition.
Women cited socio-cultural practices that impeded their progress in public domains.
A Chinese respondent reported:
A saying that ‘people can be classified into three categories: male, female,
and female PhD’.
The educated woman was the third sex because she was unclassifiable in cultural and
age-appropriate norms. The message that higher educated women are unmarriageable
was also reported by the Japanese discussant:
Young women don’t want to go to the University of Tokyo because their parents
say that if you go to the University of Tokyo you won’t be able to get married,
you won’t be able to be happy. So being conventional implies that OK there is
less risk. We have to encourage women to take the risk.
The equation of happiness with traditional choices and de-traditionalisation with
unhappiness is evocative of Ahmed’s arguments (2010) about regulatory functions of
happiness concepts. Leadership is transgression, with social and affective
consequences. It can be a sign of upward mobility, influence and power, but also a
normative fantasy about what constitutes success, and its current conditions and
limitations in the global academy mean that many women do not construct leadership
as an object of desire.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to the British Council for their support and
contributions to the Women in Higher Education Leadership initiative.
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References
Ahmed, S. (2010) The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC Duke University Press.
Berlant, L (2011). Cruel Optimism. Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press
Butler, J. (2004). Undoing Gender. London & New York, Routledge.
Cheung, F.M. & Halpern, D.F. (2010) “Women at the Top: Powerful Leaders Define
Success as Work+Family in a Culture of Gender.” American Psychologist 65(3): 182193.
Forestier, K. (2013) Manifesto for Change’ for women in higher education University
World News. 16 March Issue No:263.
http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20130313132344590.
Accessed 5 April, 2013.
Grove, J. (2013a) THE Global Gender Index. Times Higher 13 May.
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/the-global-genderindex/3/2003517.article#. Accessed 26 May, 2013.
Grove, J. (2013b) Gender Leadership Gap Tackled by Manifesto 9 March.
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/gender-leadership-gap-tackled-bymanifesto/2002419.article. Accessed 26 May 2013.
Grove, J. (2013c) Gender gap in number of female professors. 13 June 2013.
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/gender-gap-in-number-of-femaleprofessors/2004766.article. Accessed 17 June 2013.
Haake, U. (2009). "Doing Leadership in Higher Education: The gendering process of
leader identity development." Tertiary Education and Management 15(4): 291–304.
Morley, L. (2011) Imagining the University of the Future. In, R. Barnett (ed) The
Future University: Ideas and Possibilities. London, Taylor and Francis: 26-35.
Morley, L. (2012). "The Rules of the Game: Women and the Leaderist Turn in Higher
Education " Gender and Education. 25(1): 116-131.
Morley, L. (2013). International Trends in Women’s Leadership in Higher Education
In, T. Gore, and Stiasny, M. (eds) Going Global. London, Emerald: 279-298
Rees, T. (2011) ‘The Gendered Construction of Scientific Excellence’
Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 36 (2):133–45.
She Figures (2009) Statistics and Indicators on Gender Equality in Science. Brussels:
European Commission.
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Biography
Louise Morley AcSS is a Professor of Education and Director of the Centre for
Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER)
(http://www.sussex.ac.uk/education/cheer/) at the University of Sussex, UK.
Louise has an international profile in the field of the sociology of gender in
higher education studies. Her research and publication interests focus on
international higher education policy, gender, equity, micropolitics, quality,
leadership and power. She is an Academician of the Academy of Social
Sciences, a Fellow of the Society for Research into Higher Education, a Senior
Research Fellow, Centre for Gender Excellence, University of Örebro, Sweden
and the Inaugural Chair of Women's Leadership, Women’s Leadership Centre,
Universiti Kebangsaan. Malaysia.
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Paper Two: Dr Linda Morrice, Centre for Higher Education and Equity
Research (CHEER), University of Sussex, UK
Managing Social Differences in Higher Education: Hidden Distinctions
Abstract
This paper will draw on research with refugee students: a group who are not
recognised in either widening participation or international discourses, policies or
practices. The absence of recognition means that students with a refugee background,
despite often having similar academic and support needs, are rendered invisible. This
cultural misrecognition impedes their participation as ‘full partners in social
interaction’ and they are included in what Fraser refers to as a marginalised or
subordinate way (Fraser 2007: 315). The observations presented illuminate how the
experience of higher education can be marked simultaneously by belonging and
recognition, deficit and exclusion. Complex differences and inequalities remain
hidden and unspoken, raising new questions and challenges for pedagogy and for
equal participation of students. The paper calls into question the binaries between
‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’, ‘home’ and ‘overseas’ students, exclusion and
inclusion.
Keywords: refugees, recognition, equality, widening participation, exclusion.
Introduction
Widening participation policy discourses across higher education (HE) include social
justice concerns about removing structural barriers to address the under-representation
of certain social groups (HEFCE 2006; 2008). At the same time, and driven by market
values, universities are competing to recruit high fee paying overseas students.
Refugee students are not recognised in either widening participation or international
discourses, policies or practices. As a consequence little is known about refugees’
presence in, or absence from HE, or their experiences once in HE. For refugees higher
education can provide a route out of poverty, it can also be one of the key ways that
they can re-establish their lives and begin to re-build their professional identities. On
the surface, the minority who gain entry to HE appear to have settled into the
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privileged and sought after position of UK student, however, the experience of being
a refugee continues to play a significant role in their lives. There is no convenient
single narrative of what it means to be a refugee in HE, rather it is a complex
experience producing multiple, sometimes conflicted subject positions. This paper
draws on observations from life history interviews with four refugee students, two
women and two men, who attended university between 2006 and 2010. It was part of
a larger, longitudinal study involving twelve refugees; participants have been selected
as their narratives highlight the differences and complexities of refugee identities in
higher education.
Establishing Learner Identities
The kinds of learner identity constructed and the ease with which educational success
can be achieved largely depends on the extent to which existing capital, whether
educational or professional knowledge and experience, is recognised as legitimate and
can be deployed (Bourdieu 2004; Morrice 2011). For Patricia, a teacher from
Zimbabwe, the formal learning in HE was marked by a sense of belonging. She was
brought up in an education system based on the English colonial system and the
language of instruction was English. Similarities in the learning cultures and
expectations, and the absence of a language barrier, smoothed her transition to
learning in the UK and she was able to confidently draw upon the knowledge,
experience and practices she had accumulated, and apply them to the UK. She
described herself as ‘an academic’, and viewed HE as an escape from the low
expectations and racism she experienced while working in UK care homes. In contrast
Farideh, who worked as a hospital dietician in Iran, had come from a very different
education system and had to negotiate different learning styles and expectations. She
struggled with what Lillis (2001) refers to an ‘institutional practice of mystery’ where
the established literacy practices are not made explicit. She did not question her tutors
and was reluctant to approach them for help, but she was critical of the expectations
the system placed on students and the lack of clarity and transparency about those
expectations:
Some lecturers give you a lot and you have to find a little. And some give you
a little and you have to find a lot, but I still don’t know which one is what. I
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have to learn how to pick up what I need. They don’t really help…Lecturers in
Iran work much harder.
Her story is narrated from a position of difference, exclusion and deficit. She was
constantly aware that she didn’t have the ‘right’ knowledge and this was experienced
as feeling out of place, and a constant doubt and insecurity about her ability to
succeed. Classified as a home student for fee purposes, she was unable to locate or
access the support services available to international students, who might be
experiencing similar difficulties.
Hidden Distinctions and Exclusion
Dominating all of the narratives was how the refugee identity generated hidden
distinctions and exclusion. The identity of refugee cast a deep shadow on their lives,
their decision-making and ability to engage with higher education. All of the
participants were negotiating complex, often painful transnational relationships with
family members left behind, and had to cope with significant family events: births,
deaths and marriages from the distance of exile. This was coupled with additional
financial concerns and responsibilities which included sending remittances to family
overseas. Savalan from Iran was the only son from a family of five daughters. It was
his role to support not only his elderly parents, but his five sisters as they went to
university and got married. He describes the different cultural understandings and
expectations between himself and some of his fellow students:
For them it is a different story. They phone daddy or mummy and
they give them money. In my turn my mummy or daddy phones me,
and they ask me for money, so it's slightly different!
Patricia was separated from her three young children and husband for almost three
years before they managed to join her in the UK. During this time she combined full
time study with 40 or 50 hour shift work in care homes in order to send remittances to
her family.
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Loneliness and varying degrees of poor mental health impacted on the lives of all of
the students at different times. Alan, an Iranian Kurd, had worked as a civil engineer
before coming to the UK. He gained a place on a Masters programme but his ongoing
struggle with mental health issues triggered by his sudden and traumatic flight to the
UK caused him to switch from full-time to part-time study mode while he sought
medical support. Fear of deportation creates an additional layer of anxiety for some:
refugees who arrived in the UK after 2005 are given only temporary status to remain
in the UK, rather than permanent residency (Home Office 2005). After five years they
have to apply to remain in the UK. For Savalan this meant that much of his second
year was taken up with the application process and seeking to demonstrate that he was
the ‘good citizen’ he believed the authorities would allow to remain in the UK.
Significantly, these differences were lived as private and hidden; the stigmatism and
disparagement associated with refugee identity meant that students were unwilling to
confide or make public their refugee backgrounds (Morrice 2013a; 2013b). Thus
refugee students are rendered doubly invisible: they are rendered invisible in terms of
the discourses, policies and practices in Higher Education and as a consequence of
keeping their identity ‘private’ the struggles and inequalities experienced are not
recognised.
References
Bourdieu, P. (2004) The forms of capital, in: S. Ball (Ed.) Reader in sociology of
education. (London: Routledge Falmer), pp.15-29.
Fraser, N. (2007) Identity, exclusion, and critique. A response to four critics.
European Journal of Political Theory, 6 (3), pp. 305-338
HEFCE (2006) Widening participation: a review. Report to the Minister of State for
Higher Education and Lifelong Learning by the Higher Education Funding
Council for England http://www.hefce.ac.uk/whatwedo/wp/ (accessed
February 2013)
HEFCE (2008) HEFCE widening participation and fair access research strategy.
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20120118171947/http://www.hefce.
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ac.uk/widen/research/ (Accessed February 2013)
Home Office (2005a) Controlling our borders: Making migration work for Britain.
Five year strategy for asylum and immigration (London: Home Office).
Lillis, T. M. (2001) Student writing. Access, regulation, desire (London: Routledge).
Morrice, L. (2011) Being a refugee: Learning and identity. A longitudinal study of
refugees in the UK (Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books Ltd).
Morrice, L. (2013a) Refugees in Higher Education: Boundaries of belonging and
recognition, stigma and exclusion, International Journal of Lifelong
Education (DOI: 10.1080/02601370.2012.761288)
Morrice, L. (2013b) Learning and refugees: Recognising the darker side of
transformative learning. Adult Education Quarterly, 63 (3). pp. 251-271.
Biography
Dr Linda Morrice is Senior Lecturer in Education at University of Sussex, UK. Her
research interests focus on lifelong learning, equity, identity, migration and life
history. Her most recent book, Being a refugee: learning and identity. A longitudinal
study of refugees in the UK, was published by Trentham Books in 2011. Linda is a
member of the Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research at the University of
Sussex and a member of Council and Honorary Treasurer of SCUTREA (Standing
Conference on University Teaching and Research in the Education of Adults). She
is co-convener and co-founder of the ESREA (European Society for Research in the
Education of Adults) Network on Migration, Ethnicity, Racism and Xenophobia.
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Paper Three: Making a Difference? Conducting an applied study on the
experience of BME staff in English Higher Education
Professor Valerie Hey & Professor Mairead Dunne , Centre for Higher
Education and Equity Research (CHEER), University of Sussex, UK
Abstract
In 2008, the Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER) and the
Centre for Higher Education Research & Information (CHERI) at the Open
University began a collaborative study for the Equality Challenge Unit (ECU)
examining, via survey and qualitative methods, experiences of BME staff in English
higher education institutions (HEIs).
This paper discusses the politics of representing this research by interrogating its
public account through a more reflexive and affectively charged commentary
confirming the intractable features of doing ‘policy-near’ and politically sensitive
research. The paper intercuts the official version of the study: the design,
‘challenges’, data findings and policy recommendations, as published by the ECU
with a more equivocal and personal narrative conveying the ethnographic texture of
working in and across ‘difference’. We aim to demonstrate the significance of the
affective dimensions as well as the politico-methodological location of all research.
Keywords: Affective, 'Race', Policy, Representation, Non-Performativity
Background –High Stakes and High Emotion
The paper traces the formulation and conducting of the ECU funded study. The notion
of ‘assumptive worlds’ – a concern with normative views of reality - informs our
analysis, especially when combined with Butler’s notion of ‘unspeakability’ (Butler,
2005). We trace the ways in which we were challenged in multiple ways in
undertaking the work.
Our, bold, substantive concern was to see the extent, impact and reality of how
English HEIs exercised their public equality duty in relation to BME staff, as ‘race’ is
one of the ‘protected characteristics’. The research brief had been fiercely lobbied for
by the main stakeholder assisting the ECU in shaping the research – the Race Forum –
a diverse body of interested individuals and groups (union, employer, activists) rightly
agitated by the lack of progress on the issue of Black and Minority Ethnic staff within
HE, particularly staff from Black Caribbean backgrounds, born in England.
The context was thus highly contested, both in respect to the agenda and our
positioning with the ECU and the Race Forum, with our academic affiliations, our
‘race’ and our theoretical position being directly or indirectly challenged in the
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‘melting pot’ of defining the scope, coverage, sampling, methods and analysis of the
data. There were many dimensions to the affective ecology surrounding and
constituting the research as discussed below.
Driving this righteous anger was a paradoxical recognition that research, rather than
action, was being commissioned. Ideologically it was ‘needed’ to remind the sector of
the inequalities it palpably and recursively evinces in respect to difference, especially
‘race’ see the prior scoping research literature review (Leathwood et al, 2009), but to
imagine our contribution would rectify things was to place the work in a double bind
of being seen as symbolically vital but potentially practically inconsequential, given
how little success had been associated with the ‘non-performativity’ of diversity
(Ahmed, 2012). Such loading acted to pre-define the research as inevitably
‘disappointing’ not least because the ECU could not structurally mandate universities
to tackle the issue, nor allocate monies to promote ‘affirmative action’.
Research and development
The Doing of the Study, design and its difficult data.
design
The study took the shape best conveyed
in the following diagram:
Survey all HEIs in England
Interviews with support framework
coordinators plus a range of middle
management staff in 10-12 HEIs
Fieldwork in 3
case study HEIs
Pilot initiatives in
3 case study
HEIs
The study design using multiple methods rendered a highly textured data set, enabling
us to ‘read between the lines’ of official accounts. Given how Ahmed (2012) calls
race a ’sticky subject’ – causing frissons in so-called liberal institutional spaces, thus
methods allowing the truths to surface via in-depth interviews and focus groups,
proved invaluable in showing how racist power worked, often within the banality of
everyday ‘taken for granted’ modes of ordinary conduct.
We negotiated competing and contradictory pressures throughout the study not, apart
from the challenges posed by the Race Forum. ‘Assumptive worlds’ refers to the
informal operation of power in social organisations, what Bourdieu (1990) calls ‘the
rules of the game’. The idea of the assumptive world – how institutional and cultural
forms produce exclusion - was generative in thinking about the banalities of ‘racism’
comprised of both unconscious and calculatedly racist practices. It was this culture
that BME staff had to negotiate; contouring their positioning inside the assumptive
white (male, middle class-elite, heterosexual) relation of ruling (Smith, 1987). This
idea was also unexpectedly useful in thinking about our own positioning within the
assumptive worlds of those commissioning and monitoring the research outcomes.
This diagram reflects how we have theorised the antagonism between different
‘assumptive worlds’ which remain/ed at stake in presenting the research:
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An important marker of just how ‘hot’ this space was is reflected in the researchers’
feelings about presenting to the respective ‘stakeholders’. Such anxiety offers an
ironic counterpoint to the visceral data (anger, disdain, bemusement, pain) collected
as the lived realities of BME staff. It is not the intention to stake any claim to
oppression as we could ‘walk away’ after antagonistic encounters. We were called
upon to defend the emergent analysis, the extent of our data or our competence at
securing access across all the staff grades. Yet we knew we could not guarantee
inclusive coverage, given the voluntary nature of the study nor the resources at our
disposal.
Yet if ‘race’ is not fit for ‘polite company’, we as white researchers had ‘brought it
up’ legitimated as research evidence rather than as our ‘identity’. The irony of this
‘objectification’ of, what for many was the reality of their daily subjection within
racist orders, was not lost on us. We sought to honour their anger.
Impolite Racism & Desiccated Data
However, editing the final report was out of our hands so respondents vivid
experiences of inequality required further justification, couched in concerns about
‘representativeness’. Qualitative research was rendered less legitimate than the
quantitative contributions of our collaborating survey team.
One of the paradoxes of the work, that the very forces of anger which drove it from
inception and commissioning- what racism costs and how it works within the
embodiment of institutional life - were all but expunged from the report; as if the
BME subjects who spoke to us, of the vitality and vulgarity of racism as well as its
everyday ‘disguise’ in the operation of highly discretionary departmental level power,
had not spoken. What can then say about racism that makes a/ny difference of the
right kind in a policy world and context when ‘race’ is almost made to disappear even
within ostensible research into how it works as a power relation.
References
Ahmed, S. (2012). On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life.
Durham: Duke University Press.
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Bourdieu, P. (1990). In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology (M.
Adamson, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (Original work published
1982, 1987)
Butler, J. (2005) Giving an Account of Oneself NY Fordham University Press
Leathwood, C., Maylor, U. and Moreau, M. (2009) The experiences of black and
minority ethnic staff working in higher education, London: Equality Challenge Unit.
http://www.ecu.ac.uk/ publications/experience-of-bme-staff-in-he-lit-review
Smith, D. E. (1987) The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology
Toronto, University of Toronto Press.
Biography
Professor Valerie Hey is Professor of Education at the University of Sussex. She is
co-director of the Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER) located
in the School of Education & Social Work. Her research interests have been inspired
by her social and intellectual biography and are transdisciplinary in ambition working
across the fields and approaches of: feminist theory; cultural studies and sociology.
She has recently focussed on devising with colleagues in CHEER and beyond, a
cultural sociology of higher education as a means to infuse our understanding of the
Academy.
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Paper Four: Student Performativity: How Presenteesim, Learnerism and
Globalism are Eroding the Freedom to Learn
Professor Bruce Macfarlane, University of Hong Kong and Visiting Professor,
Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER), University of
Sussex, UK
Abstract
The paper sets out a conceptual analysis of student performativity as a mirror image
of teacher performativity. The former is defined as the way that students are evaluated
on the basis of how they perform at university in behavioural rather than cognitive
terms. Specifically, this includes rules on class attendance (presenteeism) and
increasing emphasis on class and peer participation as part of learning and assessment
regimes (learnerism). Students must also demonstrate their commitment to the
espoused values of the corporate university such as global citizenship and
sustainability (globalism) promoted via general education programmes and a
curriculum influenced by graduate attributes. Drawing on the work of Lasch (1979)
and Skeggs (2010), it is argued that student performativity represents the spread of the
‘performing self’ in wider society and is transforming learning at university from a
private space into a public performance with adverse consequences for student
academic freedom.
Keywords: Performing self, Student academic freedom
Paper
The term ‘teacher performativity’ is well known and the subject of a growing
literature (eg Ball, 2012). This refers, inter alia, to targets, evaluations and
performance indicators connected with the measurement of teaching quality. In a
university context, individual academics encounter research quality assessments,
student evaluation questionnaires, and sometimes income generation targets for
professors. In this paper I will argue that student performativity is the mirror image of
teacher performativity. It is just that the targets and the performance indicators that
18
differ. These typically include attending classes punctually; assessment-related
proxies for attendance such as in-class tests, presentations and class contribution
grading; participation in group work and peer evaluation exercises, posting comments
to online learning forums; and displaying or espousing values associated with
globalism. Student performativity amounts to a hidden curriculum in higher education
and marks a significant shift from learning at university as a private space to a public
performance.
Presenteeism, Learnerism and Globalism
Universities are increasingly creating a culture of presenteeism that reflects a
phenomenon previously associated with the workplace (Cooper, 1998). Under the
euphemistic banner of ‘student engagement’, students are subject to a range of
measures that monitor and punish them on the basis of their attendance record.
Measures include attendance registers, swipe cards, and assessments that are
effectively attendance proxies, such as online tracking of student contributions and inclass tests timed at the beginning of classes. Presenteeism is the result of a crisis of
confidence about the value of a higher education and a concern to demonstrate its
‘value’ to governments and parents as part of a performative culture (Macfarlane,
2013).
Learnerism (Holmes, 2004) has become an ideological discourse which is
performative in nature by seeking to empirically analyse results of educational
achievement in terms of learning outcomes and the behavioural evaluation of
students. Students are expected to actively ‘engage’ and ‘manage’ their own learning
as ‘invested participants’ (Conrad and Haworth, 1997: 553). These demands are
justified on the basis of social constructivist learning theory (eg Biggs 1996). The
authoritative role of the teacher is undermined as the importance of students
constructing understanding of knowledge for themselves is confused with them
entering this process by themselves (Mascolo 2009:7). The censorious nature of the
phrase ‘teacher-centred’ means that it is unfashionable to question the assumptions of
learnerism.
Steger (2004) defines globalism as ‘a market ideology that endows current
globalization processes with neoliberal norms, values and meanings’ (2004:4). In a
higher education context, students are being inculcated with a normative political
19
discourse centred on the values associated with globalism. This refers to the
privileging of the interests of a worldview over national, regional and local interests.
The mantras closely associated with globalism include global citizenship,
sustainability and multi-culturalism. Interdisciplinarity is seen as essential in getting
students to connect this agenda with ‘action’ and ‘democratic citizenship’ (Schneider,
2003). The mantras of globalism present a benign view of the effects of globalisation
and are found commonly within general education and elective programmes in
particular. Moreover, many universities in the UK and Australia have developed sets
of graduate attributes which contain explicit expectations that students will become
advocates of global mantras, notably global citizenship (Barrie, 2004).
The inauthenticity of performativity
In complying with the demands of performativity, academics and students need to do
so in word as well as deed. It requires a casting aside or suppression of personal views
and demands a ‘playing of the game’ (Ball, 2003). For academics this might imply,
among other things, publishing early and often in the research cycle even when this
might be at the expense of longer term goals and teaching responsibilities. Working in
a performative environment leads to inauthentic attitudes and behaviour as individuals
endeavour to conform to such expectations.
Students learn to conform, or at least simulate agreement with presenteeism,
learnerism and globalism. This is an integral part of what it now means to be a
university student now and involves students (and their professors, to some extent) in
a ritual of inauthenticity. Lip service is paid to certain elements of the teaching
regime, such as the espousal of learning ‘outcomes’, but, in practice, there is limited
belief in their veracity. There is also considerable evidence that student concerns
about fairness (eg group work assessment) and privacy (eg loss of anonymity through
forced participation in large classes, Machemer & Crawford, 2007; sharing opinions
in class, Graham et al, 2007) are routinely overridden by learnerist dogma. Those who
try to resist by refusing to ‘play the game’ by adjusting their behaviour toward the
goals and targets set are more subtly disadvantaged. Academics fail to gain promotion
or are punished in other ways, such as being excluded from research quality
20
assessment. Students who attend seminars but remain silent or fail to participate in
online learning communities are derided as ‘lurkers’ (Nonnecke and Preece, 2000).
Conclusion
There are striking parallels between the emotional, dispositional and bodily
performance of reality television show contestants (Skeggs, 2010) and student
performativity in higher education. Students must demonstrate bodily performance:
through attendance at class or virtually in online forums, dispositional performance in
terms of a willingness to comply with learnerism, and emotional performance through
espousing compliance with values central to globalism. Learning at university has
been converted from a private space into a public performance. It is, to use the words
of Lasch (1979), about the ‘performing self’.
Presenteesim, learnerism and globalism pose a threat to student academic freedom
understood in terms of both positive and negative rights. Presenteeism infantalises
students and in the process retards their capacity to exercise choice as adults
undermining a student’s right to be treated as an adult engaged in a voluntary activity.
Learnerism largely ignores the rights of students to learn in different ways as
individuals, in silence (Jin, 2012) and with a ‘right to reticence’ (Chanock, 2010) in
class. Globalism domesticates rather than empowers students as critical thinkers
through general education, elective and common core programmes that sanctify a
normative discourse reifying the mantras of globalism.
References
Ball, S. (2003) The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity, Journal of
Education Policy, 18 (2), 215-228.
Ball, S. (2012) The making of a neoliberal academic, Research in Secondary
Education, 2(1), 29-31.
Barrie, S.C. (2004) A research-based approach to generic graduate attributes policy,
Higher Education Research and Development, 23(3), 261-275.
Biggs, J. (1996) Enhancing teaching through constructive alignment, Higher
Education, 32(2), 347–64.
21
Chanock, K. (2010) The right to reticence, Teaching in Higher Education, 15(5), 543552.
Conrad C.F. and Haworth J.G. (1997) Emblems of Quality in Higher Education:
Developing and Sustaining High-quality Programs. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Cooper, C.L. (1998) The changing nature of work, Community, Work and Family, 1
(3), 313–317.
Graham, C .R ., Tripp, T .R ., Seawright, L . and Joeckel, G .L . (2007) Empowering
or Compelling Reluctant Participators Using Audience Response Systems . Active
Learning in Higher Education, 8 (3), 233–258
Holmes, L. (2004) Challenging the learning turn in education and training, Journal of
European Industrial Training, 28(8/9), 625-638.
Jin, J. (2012) Sounds of silence: Examining silence in problem-based learning (PBL)
in Asia. In S. Bridges, C. McGrath & T. Whitehill (Eds.), Problem-based learning in
clinical education: The next generation. Springer.
Macfarlane, B. (2013) The surveillance of learning: a critical analysis of university
attendance policies, Higher Education Quarterly, forthcoming.
Machemer, P.L. & Crawford, P. (2007) Student perceptions of active learning in a
large cross-disciplinary classroom, Active Learning in Higher Education, 8(1), 9-30.
Mascolo, M F. (2009) Beyond teacher- and learner-centered pedagogy: Learning as
guided participation, Pedagogy and the Human Sciences, 1, 4-27.
Lasch, C. (1979), The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in the Age of Diminishing
Expectations, London/New York, Norton Press.
Nonnecke, B., & Preece, J. (2000). Lurker demographics: Counting the silent.
Proceedings of CHI 2000. The Hague: ACM.
22
Schneider, C.G. (2003) Liberal Education and Integrative Learning, Issues in
Integrative Studies, 21, 1-8.
Skeggs, B. (2010) The Moral Economy of Person Production: the Class Relations of
Self-Performance on “Reality” Television, Sociologia: Revista do Departamento de
Sociologia da FLUP, 20, 67-84.
Steger, M.B. (ed.) (2004) Rethinking Globalism. Lanham, MD & Oxford: Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers Inc.
Biography
Bruce Macfarlane is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Hong Kong
and Visiting Professor at the Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research
(CHEER), University of Sussex. He is a Fellow and former Vice Chair of the Society
for Research into Higher Education. His previous books with Routledge include
Intellectual Leadership in Higher Education (2012), Researching with Integrity
(2009), The Academic Citizen (2007), and Teaching with Integrity (2004).
23
Paper Five: Troubling the concept: an exploration of difference within students’
experiences of critical thinking in higher education
Emily Danvers, Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER),
University of Sussex, UK
Abstract
This symposium paper intends to trouble the concept of critical thinking against a
shifting higher education landscape of increased participation, globalisation and
marketisation. The paper will socially contextualise normative understandings of what
it means to be a critical student and explore how criticality is conceptualised, enacted
and regulated in the 21st century global academy. It will use theories of power and
difference from feminist and critical realist frameworks to reflect on interview data
conducted with 14 first-year students at a small research intensive university in the
UK. Archer’s (2000; 2007) concept of the internal conversation will inform
discussion of how critical thinking can be theorised as both a personal and social act.
Ahmed’s (2010; 2012) work on the affective tensions of occupying a counterhegemonic space will explore the extent to which critical thinking can be understood
as an emotional and embodied experience, as well as an intellectual and pedagogical
one.
Keywords - undergraduates, criticality, affect, identities, diversity
Paper
Critical thinking is closely aligned with the higher in higher education; it is both a
core element of ‘graduateness’ and a cornerstone of the mission of higher education
institutions. However, although the discourse of critical thinking it is ubiquitous in
higher education, it is often misunderstood as tangible, transferrable and measurable
whereas in practice it is is complex and contextualised. In this paper I will argue that
critical thinking is a tacit social practice that is not ideologically neutral and that this
has implications for understanding and accounting for difference in the academy. The
intention of this paper is to interrogate and trouble the practice of critical thinking
across three thematic possibilities– firstly, relating neo-liberalism to the
technologisation of critical thinking; secondly, unpacking the social context of
criticality; and finally, exploring the affective consequences of embodying criticality.
Although this is primarily a theoretical paper, each thematic possibility will be
illustrated with preliminary data analysis of interviews with 14 first-year students at
the small research intensive university in the UK, to be collected in October 2013.
Evans (2004) argues that higher education has shifted from a world where critical
thought was prized to a world where universities are instead expected to fulfil the
roles of the marketplace and act as training grounds for employment, leading to the
‘death’ of critical thinking. Reflecting back on the undergraduate students I have
worked with previously, they often sought a quick fix within written assessment;
seeing critical thinking as something as easy to judge its presence in writing as it is to
check for correct spelling. Similarly, academic staff appeared to pigeonhole critical
thinking as a measurable learning outcome but struggled to conceptualise, recognise
24
and assess it. This seemed at odds with notions of critical thinking as a counter
hegemonic; a form of individual and social transformation (Foucault, 1998; hooks,
2009). While critical thinking may not be ‘dead’, potentially these vignettes relate to
the performance of a technicised, neutralised form of criticality. This has interesting
parallels with Ball’s (1995) warning about a lack of theory in educational research
working to ‘tame’ the academy. I argue that re-configuring the power within
criticality is increasingly important at a time when, for example, work on student ‘lad
culture’ in higher education (Phipps & Young, 2012) demonstrates that the academy
remains a discriminatory space.
Addressing whether critical thinking as an intellectual standard accounts for diversity
is also important at a time when the relationship between higher education and
financial reward is being problematised (Morley, 2007). If notions of intellectual gain
remain, what is the relative value of critical thinking as a positional good in a social
world that differentiates opportunity on the lines of class, gender, race and culture?
Bailin et al. (2000) discuss how the concept of critical thinking acts as a normative
enterprise to regulate standards of writing and behaviour in higher education.
Furthermore, Burke, (2012) outlines how critical thinking, like academic writing, acts
as a form of exclusive practice that privileges particular gendered forms of knowledge
and knowledge making. If critical thinking is an intellectual value that makes
education ‘higher’; to what extent is the performance of critical thinking reliant on
knowledge and language practices that are accessible only to the few? This paper, and
the interview research, will explore normative models of critical student identity and
student’s perceived understandings of how they relate to and potentially reshape these
identities. This critical identity formation will be explored in relation to Archer’s
(2000; 2007) work on the internal conversation, a process by which agents shape and
reshape their internal, reflexive dialogue in order to move through the structures of an
increasingly morphogenetic social world. I will argue that students necessarily
negotiate their critical identities in relation to this privileged discourse and that,
consequently, the enactment of critical thinking needs to be understood as socially
contextualised rather than reduced to a set of cognitive competencies.
Finally, this paper will explore the affective and embodied aspects of criticality.
Barnett (1997) argues that we should abandon notions of critical thinking for a more
social, embodied understanding of critical being. I will argue firstly that this notion of
‘being’ needs to be further interrogated as critical behaviours are enacted through
classed, raced and gendered beings. Secondly, I will explore the emotional
consequences of critical behaviour using Ahmed’s (2010; 2012) theorisation of the
affective aspects involved in occupying a counter-hegemonic, critical space. In
particular, Ahmed talks about how human happiness is defined through our ability to
be sociable, where those who do not share our ideas about goodness are read as
‘killjoy’s. This is similarly echoed by Ehrenreich (2010) who discusses how critical
thinking presents an uncomfortable challenge in our increasingly ‘positive thinking’
society. Criticality may then potentially be at odds with the need for undergraduate
students to develop positive social relationships with fellow students.
By ‘troubling’ the concept of critical thinking from these different angles, this paper
will emphasise the importance of asking questions about power, privilege and
difference in order to understand the complex social context and affective
25
consequences operating within the seemingly transparent intellectual values of higher
education.
References
Ahmed, S. (2012). On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life.
Durham [N.C]: Duke University Press.
Ahmed, S. (2010). The Promise of Happiness. Durham [N.C]: Duke University Press.
Archer, M. (2000). Being Human: The Problem of Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Archer, M. (2007). Making our Way Through the World: Human Reflexivity and
Social Mobility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bailin, S., Case, R., Coombs, J. & Daniels, L. (1999). Conceptualising Critical
Thinking. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 31(3), 285-302.
Ball, S.J. (1995). Intellectuals or Technicians? The Urgent Role of Theory in
Educational Studies. British Journal of Educational Studies, 43(3), 255-271.
Barnett, Ronald. (1997). Higher Education: A Critical Business. Buckingham:
Society for Research into Higher Education.
Burke, P. (2012). The Right to Higher Education: Beyond Widening Participation.
London: Routledge.
Ehrenreich, B. (2010). Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive
Thinking has Undermined America. New York: Picador.
Foucault, M. (1998) The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge. London,
Penguin.
hooks, b. (2009). Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom . New York and
London: Routledge.
Morley, L. (2007). The X factor: Employability, Elitism and Equity in Graduate
Recruitment. Twenty-First Century Society, 2(2), 191-207.
Phipps, Alison and Young, Isabel (2012) That's what she said: women students'
experience of 'lad culture' in higher education. London: National Union of Students.
Biography
Emily Danvers is a second-year doctoral student at the Centre for Higher Education
and Equity Research at the University of Sussex. After working in learning
development and widening participation, her research is interested in gender, diversity
and the student experience with her doctoral research is looking at the social context
and affective consequences of student critical thinking in higher education
26